Steve Jobs' widow pressured Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale not to star in biopic

dailymail. ^ | 7 October 2015 | Ollie Gillman

[dennisw]

A source involved in the making of the film, which hits screens on Friday, told The Hollywood Reporter that MS Jobs Powell had been 'trying to kill this movie' for years.

The source said: 'Laurene Jobs called Leo DiCaprio and said: "Don’t do it." Laurene Jobs called Christian Bale and said: "Don’t."'

She is even alleged to have called potential financial backers when the movie hit issues with funding.

The movie portrays Jobs in a different light to how he is seen by many, depicting him as 'heartless' and showing him disowning his daughter.

Laurene Jobs Powell phoned actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale Steve Jobs' widow lobbied them not to play role of her late husband in film Michael Fassbender got the role but emails revealed in the Sony hack showed he was not everybody's first choice Ms Jobs Powell also allegedly pressured financiers not to fund the movie Lack of money may have contributed to Sony Pictures pulling out, to be replaced by Universal Movie is out in New York and LA Friday and rest of the US later this month

Steve Jobs' widow was so determined to have the new movie about the late Apple boss canned that she contacted Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale to persuade them not to take the role.

Laurene Jobs Powell reportedly begged the Hollywood stars to avoid the leading role, with both of the actors believed to have been offered the part.

Eventually Michael Fassbender was cast as Jobs, but that was just the first of a multitude of dramas that saw the controversial biopic come close to never making the screen.

[DiogenesLamp]

Calligraphy and fonts. Jobs studied this passionately, and brought it to personal computers. At the time, personal computers were centered on boring monotone text. The world changed because of it.

I consider that incredibly trivial. It's like deciding what color to paint bombs. It is really of no consequence.

Blending technology and design. Again, Steve Jobs was instrumental in driving this. A lot of his ideas became actual products that others imitated.

Something vague and not demonstrative of an actual invention. Yes, he was the @$$hole that berated others into creating designs, and he kept brow beating them till they came up with something he thought of as aesthetically pleasing.

These are just a very few of many, and they are all Steve Jobs. His work, his brilliance.

You haven't named anything tangible. That is exactly my point. He was basically the "Red Queen" who screamed "Off with your head" to anyone that didn't "create." I don't find what he did to be particularly brilliant. Had he never met Woz, he probably would have been a nobody.

[fatima]

Thanks Swordmaker have no plans to watch it.

[Swordmaker]

What was it that he designed again?

Apple Computer Company. Without Steve Jobs, it would not exist. Steve Wozniac wanted to give away what he built to his friends for free. He would never have built a company. Never. It would not have happened. Steve Jobs designed and built Apple Computer from scratch.

The GUI based computer at Apple. Prior to Steve Jobs insisting on it, the Lisa was going to be a Command Line based computer, but he, and only he, forced the change to a GUI, mouse driven design, and he negotiated the deal to bring the LISA engineering team to Xerox PARC where he drove the agenda of what he wanted, in a computer. That was the driving force. Watch this video interview from about 30 to 36 minutes in for the perspective of one of the XEROX Engineers who was at PARC when Steve Jobs came calling with his team.

Computerized use of Calligraphic Fonts in Computing and typesetting. Steve Jobs insisted that the fonts in Macintosh computers must be excellent and would not sign off on them until they were the best that could be. . . having studied calligraphy he understood fonts and typefaces as no other computer engineer did and as a result we have desktop publishing and WYSIWYG displays and printing, something that did not reach the Microsoft world until many years after the Mac had it because of Steve Jobs innovation in making it integral to the GUI. To do it, he required the screen had to have square pixels. . . not rectangular. That was Jobs, and required lots of engineering to make it happen. His innovation. He also made the page the metaphor for the screen. . . because that is what people worked with. Again, Steve.

NeXT Computer Company. NeXT computer company would never have existed without Steve Jobs. . . he designed and created this company from scratch and the inspiration for the design of computer was Steve Jobs', no one else's. It followed the concepts and precepts of what he could not do with the Macintosh.

PIXAR PIXAR would not be what it is today without Steve's input. . . it was going down the tubes. No, he did not found it, but he re-vitalized it. . .

Apple Computer post 1998 EVERY product had Steve's imprimatur before it could be manufactured . . . and it had to meet his exacting standards or it did not get made. Or even green lighted to be started as a consumer product. That is a talent beyond value for a company to know what NOT to make. Few companies have that talent and waste a lot of resources making unnecessary products that simply don't sell. Apple had few flops under Steve Jobs because of his ability to know what would be the next thing that would be needed in the market place.

You damn Steve Jobs because you don't know what a man like Steve Jobs can do. . . because you really don't understand what "innovation" or "design" entails. IT is not sitting down at a drawing board and drawing a design, or inventing a circuit, or even coming up with a cool look. . . it is often finding and directing the talent around you and controlling what they come up with and assembling their collective efforts into a cohesive whole, making everything come together into an esthetic, working, operational and profitable product that CAN be manufactured in a reasonable time line, in sufficient quantities for a reasonable cost that can be sold in sufficient quantities to keep the company in the black. . . and do it consistently with wonderful products that the PUBLIC loves! Steve was a brilliant genius at doing all of that!

[libertylover]

I saw an interview with Steve Jobs once and he nailed the average Democrat’s philosophy, (though perhaps unintentional):

He said, “Most people don’t have any interest in earning a million dollars; what most people want to do is to SPEND a million dollars.”

[roadcat]

You haven't named anything tangible.

Shirley you've seen an Apple store. Very tangible, you can touch it. Have you used a GUI-based computer made within the last few decades? Again, tangible. A lot of design studios use Apple products for production illustration, design, and printing. They wouldn't exist were it not for Steve Jobs. You've seen a lot of movies and read illustrated books and magazines? Tangible. My point is that your words are of no consequence.

[minnesota_bound]

Christian Bale is like Steve Jobs. A hothead.

[Swordmaker]

I consider that incredibly trivial. It's like deciding what color to paint bombs. It is really of no consequence.

Amazing. . .

You don't even know what you are talking about. "Incredibly trivial" . . . yet every other computer up until then used an 8x8 grid to display text characters and Steve Jobs said "No, our computers will display fonts that are capable of displaying calligraphic fonts that are beautiful." and the proceeded to make it possible. That change is what EVERY COMPUTER TODAY USES! And you call it trivial???????

At the time those 8X8 grids meant that Microsoft Windows Mouse Pointers and cursors were blocking and jumped only horizontally and vertically in those same 8x8 grids . . . while Apple's mouse pointer moved smoothly, pixel by pixel, in gentle arcs. It was a huge difference that took almost ten years for Microsoft to catch up! It meant that Apple used SQUARE pixel elements so that graphics were easy to calculate rotations, instead of the rectangular pixels used in PCs. . . and rotations in PCs required additional calculations to compensate for the distortions added by rectangular pixels.

It meant that because you were using vector graphics to draw Calligraphic fonts, esthetically pleasing fonts, you could RESIZE them to any point size you wanted. . . and that meant they were not limited to multiples of the 8x8 grid for printing seen on the screen! it meant kerning, spacing, and everything applicable to TYPESETTING. It meant that Apple computers became the go to computers of creation for newspapers, magazines, artists, and any other who needed flexibility and not constraint to an 8x8 distorted grid.

You see, DiogenesLamp, insisting on Calligraphic fonts on computers was one of the least trivial additions to computers of the last 75 years. . . and STEVE JOBS did it.

Something vague and not demonstrative of an actual invention. Yes, he was the @$$hole that berated others into creating designs, and he kept brow beating them till they came up with something he thought of as aesthetically pleasing.

Again, you DO NOT GET IT. Try this:

• On the LEFT, the esthetic design of smartphones before Steve Jobs' esthetic design sense created the iPhone in 2007.
  
• On the Right, the esthetic design of smartphones after Steve Jobs esthetic design sense created the iPhone in 2007.

Had Woz never met Steve Jobs, he would have been a geek in a world of geeks, working for HP until he got a job working for another company, until they went under, or he changed jobs, and he would have been a nobody too. He had no ambition to be anything except a geek who made cool computers for his friends. It took Steve Jobs for everything to happen. . . and YOU can't see it.

Woz wanted to sell the Apple I for $186 the price of the parts. . . counting his labor to assemble as NOTHING. Steve wouldn't let him. He insisted Woz come up with a higher number. Woz then said $250. . . but Steve still insisted on yet a higher number. . . and finally Woz said retail for $666. They wholesaled them for $500, with a retail for $666. Had Woz been left on his own, he'd have sold them for his cost and had even given some away of his earlier creations away. No, Steve was necessary. He was the spark plug.

[Falconspeed]

Very good summary. Thank you. Mr. Jobs was a genius who knew what he wanted but lacked social skills. I read Gil Amelio’s “On the Firing Line” twice.

It is correct to say that designers use Mac’s. I remember in the late 1990’s how Macs worked smoothly while Windows was crashing weekly.

[TheBattman]

“Other people could have...”

But did they?

[DesertRhino]

He thought cauliflower could cure pancreatic cancer. I just cant get past that one. So smart in some ways, idiotic in others. kinda normal I guess.

[353FMG]

Instead of buying the APPLE IIC I should have bought Apple stock.

[Swordmaker]

Instead of buying the APPLE IIC I should have bought Apple stock.

History tells me the best purchase would have been to have invested $666 in an Apple 1 and put it away in a very safe place, like a safe deposit box. One sold for about $905,000 just a year ago. . . Now, where did I put that time machine. Damn, getting old is terrible. Can't remember where I put things down.

[Liberty Valance]

[Swordmaker]

One of the first Macs I bought for personal use was a performa 6360/160. . . then I bought a 6400 tower.

We bought a lot of 20 - Performa 6200s, with monitors, from a Jewish museum who had used them for a three-month exhibition starting in August of 1995 and we bought them in December off eBay. . . one of the very first computer auctions ever held on eBay! In fact, I had driven to eBay's office and picked up my 6360 at their office (it had been one of the employee's computer) just a week or so after they opened for business. LOL! These we had to drive to LA to pickup because they were on a too expensive to ship individually.

We only needed four for our office at the time, but we donated six of them to the charity I had founded. . . and sold the rest to patients. The ten we sold paid for the entire cost of acquiring all of them in the auction.

[DiogenesLamp]

Have you used a GUI-based computer made within the last few decades?

Xerox. Not Jobs.

A lot of design studios use Apple products for production illustration, design, and printing. They wouldn't exist were it not for Steve Jobs.

Because the idea of different fonts, etc is just too brilliant for anyone else to think of.

You've seen a lot of movies and read illustrated books and magazines? Tangible.

I may be mistaken about this, but I think Thomas Edison invented movies, and Gutenberg invented the printing press.

[DiogenesLamp]

You don't even know what you are talking about. "Incredibly trivial" . . . yet every other computer up until then used an 8x8 grid to display text characters and Steve Jobs said "No, our computers will display fonts that are capable of displaying calligraphic fonts that are beautiful." and the proceeded to make it possible. That change is what EVERY COMPUTER TODAY USES! And you call it trivial???????

I hear every computer today uses a keyboard. I think they had those on typewriters back in the 19th century.

Fonts were an evolutionary change that was going to happen anyway. You can give Jobs some credit for pushing them early, but in the larger scheme of things, they were coming anyways.

At the time those 8X8 grids meant that Microsoft Windows Mouse Pointers and cursors were blocking and jumped only horizontally and vertically in those same 8x8 grids . . . while Apple's mouse pointer moved smoothly, pixel by pixel, in gentle arcs. It was a huge difference that took almost ten years for Microsoft to catch up!

The very definition of a trivial improvement, otherwise known as "cheese". Visually appealing, but functionally of no consequence.

It was a huge difference that took almost ten years for Microsoft to catch up! It meant that Apple used SQUARE pixel elements so that graphics were easy to calculate rotations, instead of the rectangular pixels used in PCs. . . and rotations in PCs required additional calculations to compensate for the distortions added by rectangular pixels.

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. A 1978 Apple II had a better graphics system than what the IBM PC developed probably for the first five years. That Apple IIs and later could do far better graphic manipulation for about a decade than could PCs, is more the result of IBM deliberately handicapping their machine when they built it.

If you look at IBM's design philosophy, they claim it was deliberate, so as to distinguish a "business" computer from a toy computer, such as Apple et al produced. IBM was *WAY BEHIND* on adding decent graphics to their machines, and it wasn't because they couldn't, it's because those bone heads didn't want to. Dumbness on the part of IBM does not equal "brilliance" on the part of Steve Jobs. Other companies weren't so stupid. Look at the Amiga. If I recall properly, it had even better graphics than Apple at the time.

It meant that because you were using vector graphics to draw Calligraphic fonts, esthetically pleasing fonts, you could RESIZE them to any point size you wanted. . . and that meant they were not limited to multiples of the 8x8 grid for printing seen on the screen! it meant kerning, spacing, and everything applicable to TYPESETTING. It meant that Apple computers became the go to computers of creation for newspapers, magazines, artists, and any other who needed flexibility and not constraint to an 8x8 distorted grid.

Ivan Sutherland, 1963. Not Steve Jobs.

You see, DiogenesLamp, insisting on Calligraphic fonts on computers was one of the least trivial additions to computers of the last 75 years. . . and STEVE JOBS did it.

No, I still say it's trivial. It's artistic crap. It is the computer equivalent of "pretty". The thing will work fine with out it, and very few jobs cannot be done using just a single font. "Style" is a concept you apply to clothes, but a belt will hold up your pants whether it be stylish or not. I think the nation has become overloaded and obsessed with style over substance.

On the LEFT, the esthetic design of smartphones before Steve Jobs' esthetic design sense created the iPhone in 2007.
On the Right, the esthetic design of smartphones after Steve Jobs esthetic design sense created the iPhone in 2007.

You mean after screens were developed. What you are saying is that if Steve Jobs hadn't put a screen on his phone, the world would never have developed phones with screens on them. I think that assessment is just ridiculous. Again, evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Oh! And what's this?

It's a "Logan's Run" Sandman "follower" from 1976. Sort of resembles an Early version of the Iphone, but it was before they had actual screens that worked like that.

Well no wonder Steve Jobs had so little trouble "inventing" it. All the "vision" work was already done for him.

Steve wouldn't let him. He insisted Woz come up with a higher number. Woz then said $250. . . but Steve still insisted on yet a higher number. . . and finally Woz said retail for $666.

It is pretty well established that Steve Jobs was pretty insistent upon getting top dollar for himself regarding other people's work. You talk about him increasing the costs of Apple Computers as though it were a good thing.

On the other hand, imagine how much more good could have been accomplished in the world had the Apple II been more affordable to young people.

My recollection is that an Apple II cost about $1,500 dollars in 1978. A lot of young people couldn't afford them because of the high price. (I was one of them.) Good to know we have Steve Jobs to thank for that bit of A$$holery as well.

What did he do next? He launched the "Apples for Teachers" program, which pretty much meant the Government would be making up a major portion of Apples foundational business, and that Apple would be welded into the Union education system and left wing politics.

Yeah, that was just great.

[roadcat]

No use arguing with you, you don't operate on logic and are all over the place. Akin to saying NASA didn't invent sending a man to the Moon because the Chinese were sending little rockets into the night sky hundreds of years ago. Wake up, man, and stop dredging for nonsensical explanations to try to bolster your arguments. It's like listening to my three-year-old grandkids.

Thomas Edison did not create digital movies. One reason digital movies are popular is because of Pixar. They did pioneering work in making a sea change to digital movies and projection. Oh, Steve Jobs had a hand in that, as Pixar was going no where and Jobs built up the company from practically nothing. Jobs was focused on creating the digital technology at Pixar, while letting the team there be focused on creating the stories.

Same goes for Gutenberg. Did he drive digital technology in allowing magazines to blend colors, photos and fonts before they're printed in multiple layers? I don't think so. A couple of my daughters worked in the magazine business, most of their publishing was done with Apple Macs. Gutenberg didn't create them.

Then there's Xerox. There is so much bullcrap about them creating the Mac, so I won't even go into it. As Swordmaker explained, Xerox did not create the GUI architecture that Apple created.

[roadcat]

One sold for about $905,000 just a year ago. . .

Oh yes, the Apple 1. I passed on opportunities to buy one for under $2000, because I thought it was too much. Kicking myself ever since. To be fair, those going for the highest prices have some documentation and history that goes with them. So if you bought one and it still worked but had no docs then you might only fetch $500,000. Still a tidy profit!

[DiogenesLamp]

Akin to saying NASA didn't invent sending a man to the Moon because the Chinese were sending little rockets into the night sky hundreds of years ago.

It is a testament to your degree of disconnect with what is really important in the world, for you to compare what Jobs did with "sending a man to the moon."

In proper context, what Steve Jobs did would be more akin to painting "NASA" on the side of the rocket. Yup, he did a pretty good Job, but let's get real. The Actual nuts and bolts work was done by other people. (They are called Engineers.)

Thomas Edison did not create digital movies.

No, he did the real creative bit. Thinking of the concept of "movies" and then building it in hardware. That it would eventually be represented by digital technology was as predictable as the night following the day. While we're at it, Steve Jobs didn't create digital movies either. Technology produced by a lot of other people who were not him, did that. Steve just happened to be the head of a company when the technology matured enough to be used.

A couple of my daughters worked in the magazine business, most of their publishing was done with Apple Macs. Gutenberg didn't create them.

Neither did Jobs. Engineers who worked for him did.

As Swordmaker explained, Xerox did not create the GUI architecture that Apple created.

Which means they thought of the idea, and built it in hardware. Jobs comes along and says "Wow! That's neat! I'm going to brow beat my engineers into building one of these, only it's going to be extra-spectacular-super-duper better!

"Now where did I put my whips and chains?"

[Swordmaker]

Xerox. Not Jobs.

Xerox's SmallTalk Star GUI interface bears very little relationship to the GUI that Apple developed under Steve Jobs. Apple invented the drag and drop LIVE Icon system that would open the app of a document dropped on the icon that you drop it on, the draggable, overlapping windows, drop-down, nested menus, the infinitely reachable top menu, and contextual menus.

Because the idea of different fonts, etc is just too brilliant for anyone else to think of.

But they did not. . . They were using fixed fonts in slugs. Sorry, you have no leg to stand on here. The ability to do layout on a computer was a big thing. . . Steve Jobs did it.

I may be mistaken about this, but I think Thomas Edison invented movies, and Gutenberg invented the printing press.

I see, Gutenberg did not invent the printing press, he invented hand carved wooden movable type, which made printing books far more economical then carving every page into a block and doing the printing with a wooden block that allowed maybe a hundred imprints before the block was worn beyond use. . . but you equate that with him inventing the hot-lead Linotype machine that was made obsolete by the modern computer with scalable font systems essentially invented by Steve Jobs and Apple? You are delusional.